Remembering "the little things" accomplished as governor

Holshouser remembers "the little things" he accomplished as governor that gave him satisfaction, such as modernizing the state license plate system, preventing the damming of the New River, and establishing an ombudsman's office. He elaborates on the role of ombudsman, an official who can listen to citizen complaints, and on his involvement in preserving the New River, a move he made for personal reasons but which benefitted him politically.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with James E. Holshouser Jr., June 4, 1998. Interview C-0328-4. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JACK FLEER:

Governor Holshouser, what was the most satisfying decision that you made
as Governor?

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

I am trying to think. I am not sure I remember what I said the last time.
I look at the big picture and it was getting some things done that I had
not been able to do as a legislator which is the reason that I ran for
governor to start with I think. So just little things like changing the
five-year license tags, saving the state money. We had the private
sector come in and do an efficiency study. Came back with a whole bunch
of recommendations about 600 of them and as implemented it was suppose
to save us about 80 million dollars a year. Now that is the kind of
thing that managers ought to be doing periodically, not every other year
because it is fairly time consuming. But once a decade at least that
kind of thing ought to happen. In terms of specific things I have a
feeling that avoidance of damming up the New River probably not only
took about as much time as any single thing during the whole four years
but also had as much of my own heart and soul in it as about anything.
That was a long fought battle that was won and that was satisfying. I
think the establishment of an ombudsman office so that the people had
some place to come when they could figure out who they were suppose to
talk to about a problem in state government was a good step forward in
terms of how people feel about their government. I guess overall looking
back finishing four years with people feeling like
the governor had been trustworthy and responsive to the kind of problems
we had was as satisfying as any thing looking back at the four years.
That is not a thing, a project, but it is important.

JACK FLEER:

Important legacy actually.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

And in a sense secondarily to that from the standpoint of building a two
party system in the state it was satisfying. People felt like that the
government could be entrusted to Republicans without the world coming to
an end.

JACK FLEER:

Let's talk a little bit about the ombudsman decision that grew
out of or was certainly associated with your people's day
efforts.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

That is right.

JACK FLEER:

And what did you expect from the establishment of that office and what do
you think it achieved?

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

Well sometimes you get results that you don't expect in a way.
When we started off with the people's day things, it was one
of these things that you do it as much as to let people have the
opportunity even if they don't exercise it as you do for the
people who come in. But at the same time setting up the mechanism with
the people that was going to staff that project and then expanding that
into a full-grown ombudsman effort. It seemed to me it should have been
a very positive long term thing saying that John Jones out here on the
street, you have got a problem with DOT or the Department of Corrections
or Environment or whatever. You have got some place you can call without
having to be bounced around from phone to phone in the government which
happens an awful lot. I mean it still happens to me and I know the
government pretty well. Occasionally I will call up and they will say no
you need to talk to so and so and I'll
call and he will be out of town until next week and he calls back and
says no, that is not my department, somebody told you wrong. And I
don't get frustrated because I sort of know about those
things. But the average person on the street sometimes will just throw
up their hands and say I can't get anywhere with this. Now I
have not really kept up to see whether that office has functioned on a
continuing bases or not. There has been a separate effort on
volunteerism. It seems to me that maybe those two offices got
merged.

JACK FLEER:

They have been.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

And how well the office functions as an ombudsman, it is hard for me to
know.

JACK FLEER:

I was tracking yesterday in the budget office, the growth of the
governor's office and particularly the growth of what is now
called the Office of Citizens Help or Citizens Affairs which title they
are using right now. The ombudsman is part of that and it is pretty
significant. I think Governor Hunt, for example, picked up on
particularly the volunteer side but also kept the ombudsmen side going.
But it has continued to a part of the governor's office and
an important part of the governor's office.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

And the trick about this is that I am not sure that Joe Jones out there
on the street knows to call that particular office. Now if the people in
the administration are turned in the first call that comes that it is
not in my jurisdiction I ought just to send them to the ombudsmen office
but I suspect that doesn't happen. It is a little hard to
know you. Sometimes you set things in motion and you have a core but it
takes more tentacles of reaching out within the various departments. But
what I did find is that the people in that office, because they spoke
with the authority of the governor's office, could cut
through a bunch of what politicians call the bureaucracy and the red
tape and get a response back to people even if it
wasn't always what they were looking for. Frankly a lot of
times if you got the response back to somebody even if it was no, if you
could explain to them why it was no, that was enough.

JACK FLEER:

On the New River decision why was that so satisfying?

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

Well I grew up in the mountains. Watauga County was just adjacent to Ashe
and Allegheny was next over. A long time a friend of my father, a lawyer
by the name of Floyd Crouse over in Sparta, had been very involved
during the Scott administration in the citizens' efforts
against the dam so to speak. You had some people who thought this was
going to be the greatest thing since slice bread. Real estate developers
could just see lots of things but it was going to change the basic
character of that part of the state. There were enough people who felt
so strongly about the land and its use that I became convinced that it
would be much better to leave it as it was. I don't guess I
will ever know whether that was right or not because you
don't know what would happen the other way. We spent a lot of
time and books were written about it. But it was very well down the
pipeline at the time I came into office. The state basically had a
posture of not fighting the (national) government. There were three or
four different initiatives in court, some in Congress, some in the state
legislature. As I indicated to you previously there were congressional
offices involved — Vinegar Ben Mizell, Steve Neal. Rufus
Edmisten when he became Attorney General and Senator Helms office all
took an active hand at one time or another. I ended up going to see, I
think it was, four different secretaries of the Interior over time to
get their support for the approach of using the Wild and Scenic
River's Act as a mechanism to say you can't touch
this.

JACK FLEER:

It was quite an effort coordinating the various levels of government and
different offices. Now did you see any political benefits from this or
was it essentially an environmental decision?

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

You total up the total votes in Ashe and Allegheny counties and they
weren't going to get anybody elected on a statewide bases or
anything. This didn't have anything to do with politics
except in the best sense of the term.

JACK FLEER:

I was talking with the former editor of the Winston Salem Journal a
couple of weeks ago about the New River decision.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

Yes Wallace Carroll was very interested in that too and as instrumental
as anybody in helping to generate support.

JACK FLEER:

And he indicated that his paper decided to endorse you and he believes,
although I haven't actually checked this, that in their major
counties of circulation you actually won at least in part I suppose
because of your New River decision and your involvement with the New
River.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

I don't know. I don't remember the New River being
that big of a campaign issue per se. It was heating up but if you asked
me right now what were the major issues in the campaign I
wouldn't say that was one of them. I may be
mis-recollecting.

JACK FLEER:

No I don't think he is implying that either but I think what
he might have been implying was the power of the Winston Salem
Journal.

JAMES E. HOLSHOUSER, JR.:

Well you know the Republicans hadn't got many big city
newspapers endorsement. Getting the Charlotte Observer and Winston Salem
papers endorsements were probably as significant of a factor in winning
as anything.